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Topic: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from? (Read 557875 times)

I'm a Scots ex-pat living in South Texas, been programming since around 74 (at high school, we used to send coding sheets off to the local poly where students were paid to punch them on to cards - a compile/edit/run iteration took about a week), and I write code for fun probably more than I do for a living (although I work in a 'computer center', we generally don't do a lot of coding here, and what we do isn't very interesting). At the moment my hobby project is writing a book on how to write a compiler (and writing a compiler to go along with the book). But I usually have half a dozen different projects on the go at any one time. And a backed-up queue of others that'll see me through retirement! I can easily see myself contributing the odd quickie utility here, as long as you're OK with command-line stuff written in C. If you want gooey flashness, someone else will have to add that...

I am a 46 year old civil servant from Berlin, Germany. I am happily married to a beautiful woman and father of three, two sons and a daughter. I have been a science fiction and comic fan all my life, collected both during high school and college (studying American and Japanese culture) and of course came into contact with computers way back in 1984 when I bought a Commodore 64 and a floppy drive. "Things went downhill from then".

When my dad bought his first PC two years later, I quickly learned to work with it, explain its subtleties to my father and bringing his writing into shape. At that time I used DOS 3.3 and Word for DOS 5.0. I quickly became a renowned and experienced layouter, typed as fast as any administrative assistant. My dad published several books to which I delivered anything short of pre-press.

I got several jobs within his university circles (?), working as admin, layouter, administrative assistant and anything in between that made the writing of those doctors and professors look good. I learned incredibly much about hard- and software, networking, drivers and converters - remember, we are talking DOS here. I even tested a Windows 3.0 version on a 1-ton compaq laptop.

During that time I got married, we had our first child and I had to change something in my life to ensure a steady and sufficient income in the future. I had a 3 year college study course in municipal administration, preparing me to work anywhere within the Berlin government or administration. After several stints in plain legal or personnel departments I switched to the central unit of our loan and payment software development and maintenance.

We use a SAP based solution that ensures the correct and on-time payments to some 80.000 people within our administration. Berlin is a city with more than five million inhabitants. In this unit I work as admin for some 60 PCs, do some hotline and troubleshooting, maintain our website and take care of our huge pool of data when it comes to reorganisation and maintenance. Our house as its own IT dept., but I am the in-betweener taking some unnecessary load from them by helping my team to a certain limit.

Apart from that I have a ton of hobbies, a garden to take care of, a lot of sport events to attend when my kids play soccer, do cheerleading (honest, even Berlin has its share of football teams) or do 24-hour-swimming. We have four dogs and pudgies, a good share of friends. All in all we are a real Brady Bunch in a five-story-building. I pinned my location to the map.

40 year old man here. Almost finished with degree in IS - Network design. Six children, three still at home. Single dad. Semi-pro photographer, working on maybe being FT pro. Developing portfolio. Found Christ in '93 and turned my life totally around.

Live in Florida after a short stint with the Marines. I miss that job. I work as an assistant dufus at an apartment complex.

Who am I? that is a really good question, Born in England, grown up in New Zealand, lived and worked in New Zealand, USA and currently in China, so right now I am still trying to work that out. I also have a BSc in Computer Science, currently working in the customer support/marketing fields, and thinking about thinking English to non English speaker. I am not to sure who I am. hehe

Wow, looks like I'm surrounded by a lot of grandpas, how sweet it is.It's nice to meet everyone here.

I'm 28, just got my Master in Computer Science from Texas A&M recently.I was born in Rolla, Missouri, US and moved to Taiwan with my parents when I was 7.After staying in Taiwan almost 19 years, I came back to US for my master.

As you may know Taiwan is a computer country, many computer parts are made/designed in Taiwan (ASUS,Gigabyte,Acer...etc).Computer parts can be easily bought, it is as easy as buying a coke so people in Taiwan usually don't buy bundled PCs, we always DIY.Most of my undergrad classmates work in the computer industry, even my girlfriend works in ASUS as a RD.I've been DIYing Computers and programming since high school when I was 17,and maintaining UNIX-like servers, writing/modfying server programs as an administrator for years.

I miss my girlfriend and those delicious food/ night life funs in Taiwan, but I really love my car, the big road, and the big steak in Texas.[attach=#2][/attach][attach=#1][/attach]

OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

Im debian. Im from Boise ID and i do mostly website management and development. Right now, i am working on a project where we upload *.CSV files to a sharepoint server via PHP script. We may also have it parse the data and convert the *.CSV into a *.HTML so if one of our co workers is away, they can bring up the information from a computer terminal with out having to carry around a thumbdrive.

I also manage my own sharepoint server and run my own little website (http://pcjbargains.webhop.net) which me and my friends post items that we wish to sell. There arent very many items on there at the moment as we are working on aquiring pictures and descriptions of the items, but they'll be up shortly.

Welcome all, of course, but a special welcome to akiecs. I'm not familiar with Taichung (the city in the picture), but live not too far from it. (Heck, any place isn't too far from each other here compared to the U.S., or Texas.)

I'm one of the few who don't work in the computer industry, but I DIY my desktops as well, so what akiecs says is true.

-- Ming-Li, getting a little excited to see someone from Taiwan (well, not exactly, but close).

p.s. DC is one of the very few places online that make me feel a little chatty from time to time. Still not sure why.

I'm 23 years old, my name is Chad, I'm male, married, a Christian, and currently living in Knoxville, TN. I say currently because I have lived many places and may be moving again shortly. I have no real profession yet and am currently unemployed . I have full intent of going to college to change all of that, but I have been finding that immensely difficult. Apparently, the government does not provide support to those living in their parents house, so I need to move out on my own but haven't yet gotten the means to do that. I suppose they figure my parents are supporting me, lol. One good look at my father's tax history would disprove that theory but that's life as the saying goes.

My background in computers and such is basically all self taught to some degree or another. I did take A+, Net+, and Cisco CCNA up to year 3 in school, but honestly those things are useless in practical day to day circumstances. Most of my solid knowledge about computers and such comes from reading literature about computers and operating systems. I've read the course material to have many Linux and other certifications (NTFS forensics as well, if that's even a certification one can get).

I have programmed little unfortunately, but what I have done has taught me a lot about the concept of programming and in turn I was able to teach a friend who had been programming for a while to program better. I guess my point is that I know the concepts, just not the language. I made a really dynamic game of pong on the TI-89+ which I called crapong. Unfortunately, that name was already taken but I didn't know that at the time lol. I studied but never learned Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, C, C++, and BASIC. I suppose I just got so far and ended up not going through due to laziness, getting distracted, etc. The one language that I did learn I learned by simply looking at example code and changing it to my liking (I'm convinced this is the best way to start learning a programming language, atleast if you can go through it the way I was able to). That would be mIRC scripting. I know it seems weird as a language to learn, it's just what I learned and it has made it immensely difficult to go to any other language since I know it so well. It sounds silly to say, but I can do nearly anything I've ever really wanted to do on a computer in mIRC scripting, so I have had a very difficult time learning other languages.

I am still in search of finding the right career for me, that will allow me to express my creativity, express my ability to teach others, and allow me to continue to grow in knowledge about computer related things or all things in general. These are really the things that matter most to me, I would truly hate a job where learning is not a part of it. I am constantly wanting to learn and grow in my knowledge about things, but seem to find less and less time to do so these days being married and having the stresses that come with it. I suppose one could say I am a bit of a knowledge-aholic, as I don't believe I will have ever learned enough to completely satisfy my desire to learn. Some people call me a renaissance man as I seem to be able to do just about anything somewhat well, or atleast know a 'more than average' amount about many subjects, however, a specialization in one hasn't truly surfaced just yet.

I guess that is me in a nutshell. I know there probably isn't anyone here interested enough to read it, but there it is just incase lol.

I am still in search of finding the right career for me, that will allow me to express my creativity, express my ability to teach others, and allow me to continue to grow in knowledge about computer related things or all things in general. These are really the things that matter most to me

My name is Tyler and I'm currently in school to learn software engineering. I've been a member of the site and been lurking on the forums for a while now and I've finally decided to start participating.

I am still in search of finding the right career for me, that will allow me to express my creativity, express my ability to teach others, and allow me to continue to grow in knowledge about computer related things or all things in general. These are really the things that matter most to me

The best comment I ever heard made about that "problem" was in an imagined commencement speech written by journalist Mary Schmich.

(BTW: This same "speech" was also wrongly attributed to Kurt Vonnegut after a hoaxer put it up on the net saying it was given by Vonnegut at MIT's commencement.)

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. Themost interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do withtheir lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Thanks for your encouraging words everyone. I surely appreciate it. I hope to score high on the list of interesting people as the journalist put it.

It is my ultimate goal to give to this world a legacy, one which will be lasting and good. I want to improve all that I can while I'm here and would like to be remembered, but it seems finding a way to excersize such thing can be difficult. I truly believe I am able to do many things, if only I had the time and resources to do so hah. I guess that is really how many people feel though. It is unfortunate that usually the ones with the desire/ability to make such positive changes in the world don't have the resources, and those who do have the resources and power to make those changes do things for all of the wrong reasons. To be quite honest, their success is usually a byproduct of this attitude.

I suppose there are those who do not care about the world and its direction but rather live in it and enjoy what they can get out of life and those who do care about the world and find enjoyment from solving issues and providing their talents to help others. I would fall into the latter category.